I never thought about it much – what I said every school day morning when the teacher took attendance.
Here.
I am here. I exist in this time and place. This unrepeatable day brought me here, of all places. In this space, with these people.
Here.
This is where I live and breathe.
Here.
To be fully in the present moment. To be called by name. If I’m at all aware, then this is a sacred moment.
But that’s a big if…
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me – I am too often unaware.
It was the first class assignment: cover the book to keep it in good condition. I used paper grocery bags. It was easy to read whatever I wrote on them, and I could add stickers or pictures to dress them up.
By the end of January, most of my covers were worn, torn, and re-taped. Some were close to falling off or falling apart; they no longer protected the books. So I recovered them with grocery bags, tape, and new stickers and pictures. At the end of the year, the books entrusted to me were in good shape, ready for the next person to use and protect.
Other than cookbooks, I never covered books after high school. Other than library books, which I took good care of (and still do), what I read I owned. Since I wasn’t handing them in or handing them down, there was no pressure to preserve them for other hands and other eyes. I kept and continue to keep my personal library in good shape, but I’m willing to put my own books at risk (take to the beach, on a trip, read while drinking hot cocoa) more than ones on loan.
I think damage is done when I mistake what is on loan to me for something I own, when I don’t think beyond my own life to what comes after. And I don’t own most things – air, soil, plants, animals. I need to put some effort into handing these things on in good condition. And I need to remember that doing so will not be a one-and-done activity.
It’s the place I began my school day, seventh through twelfth grade: art studio, math class, social studies center, history room, physics lab, and English literature classroom. Only twice did I have an actual class in that year’s home room; only once out of those two times was it with my home room teacher. The only effect my home room had was that it governed where my locker was located.
The others sharing my home room changed yearly. Sometimes, I was assigned a seat in alphabetical order; other times, I could choose my seat but could not switch it; once, after the home room teacher had learned everyone’s names, I could sit anywhere I wanted for as many or as few days as I wished. Rarely were any of my friends in my home room. School began with a bell, a settling down in home room, roll call, then announcements, perhaps a short conversation with the person next to me. Eight minutes and a second bell and home room was over.
Home room was the one place, the one time of the day, that I had no common goal or activity with the others in the room. There was no shared subject, homework, or guidance for conversation or getting along. Home room was a randomly assigned time and place that asked nothing of me beyond acceptable behavior. If any friendships were going to grow, any connections made, I had to work for them. I could engage with whomever was there or keep my distance.
Although it wasn’t really a class, it taught me a lesson. The spaces in between intentional work or study, the times when I found myself among strangers without a common purpose, would be what I made of them.
That stuck with me. It’s the quick conversation in the grocery check-out, the moment passing someone on the sidewalk, eye contact on the subway, or the occasional catching up with the neighbor down the street these days. Some of these lead to deeper connections, most don’t. But each offer a moment, an hour, a day, a lifetime lived better for its happening.
We moved to Virginia just before my fifth grade year began. The week before school started, my mother took me to Kingston Elementary School for registration and placement testing. An hour and several tests later, the vice principal told me the name of my teacher (Mr. Blake) and asked me if I had any questions. It went something like this:
Where is my bus stop?
What do you mean?
Where do I stand to get the bus to school?
I don’t know. Just ask one of your friends.
Is there anyone else here who knows where the bus stop is?
I don’t know. Ask one of your friends.
I stopped asking. There seemed to be no point in pointing out the obvious: I didn’t yet have any friends to ask. After an hour of testing my language and math skills, the grown-up in charge of registering new students couldn’t answer a very simple and practical question, and didn’t take the time to find someone who could.
On the first day, I found the bus stop by walking up the road until I saw some kids standing together and asking them if this was the bus stop for Kingston Elementary School. A girl named Rita Weimorts said yes, beginning a friendship and helping me get where I needed to go.
The vice principal wasn’t a bad man, but he lacked the ability to put himself in the shoes of a child who was new to the area. He had forgotten how to reason like a child. Since he was in charge of registering new pupils, that shortcoming had consequences for who knows how many children. He could have offered the grace of true hospitality for the time and effort it took to regain his childlike perspective by asking himself: how would I feel if_______________?
She wasn’t impressed with us, which wasn’t surprising – cats have no use for the people next door, especially when they have two felines of their own. But each year of the last thirteen, she’s allowed us to become a bigger part of her life, even leaving a few mice on the doorstep for us to enjoy. In the last couple of years, Mosi was downright affectionate – an unexpected grace from an unlikely source.
Last night, Mosi’s 20 year old body started to shut down. Since her owner is away, we kept her company through her last hours, making sure she was comfortable. This morning, my husband and older son buried her.
As it usually goes, we had no say in Mosi becoming our neighbor. All we could do was choose to enjoy or ignore her. We chose to enjoy her, and she chose to do the same with us – neighbors by choice as well as circumstance.
Thank you, Mosi, for making love thy neighbor a joyful adventure.
Something written in pencil can be erased, making it easier to correct mistakes or remove a foundational sketch once it’s been inked. Something written in pen shows up more clearly on the page and cannot easily be removed. There are advantages to both. I used pencils a lot more than pens from kindergarten through high school. In college, it was 50-50. In graduate school, I favored pens – not because I liked them better, but because there were very few pencil sharpeners on campus.
These days, I’m back to the 50-50 ratio. Pens are for cards, official signatures, and crosswords; pencils are for grocery lists, brainstorming, and daily math. If I’m drawing Celtic knots, I use both. Pencils are for letters and figures that are transitory, that I might need to change and adapt; ink is for the more permanent words and images.
It’s rare that I cannot quickly and easily choose between pencils and pens for a given task. I can’t say the same in the larger, existential sense. There are times when I mistake what is transitory – what needs to be flexible and changeable – for what is permanent. There are times when I mistake the permanent – what is foundational – for what is short-term. Both are necessary and life-giving. Wisdom is knowing which one is which. Wisdom is knowing they are not interchangeable.
Compass, Ruler, Protractor – required school supplies that are rarely used after graduation. Unless, of course, you are an artist, architect, builder, woodworker, or crafter. These help you draw a good circle, a straight line between two points, and figure out the degree of an angle. With the right notation, a plan drawn on paper – landscape, building, airplane, boat – can be made three dimensional. All that’s needed is the scale.
That’s the thing, though: the scale. What we sketch out in our lives, if not kept in scale, can end up in laughter, a lesson learned, or disaster. Proportion is important. Whether or not we ever use these instruments after graduation…
At the beginning of August, we made the annual trip to Sears, Montgomery Ward, and Porteous Mitchell to pick out clothes and shoes. What we couldn’t find in stores, we found in the pages of the Sears catalog. Just about everyone we know did the same, although the choice of stores might vary. Most everyone got at least one new outfit and a new pair of shoes for the first day of school; after that would come the outgrown hand-me-downs from older siblings. That new outfit heralded the new school year just as much as a new home room and a new grade level.
School shopping is still alive and well; the local Target is full of families preparing for the upcoming year. So is the local LLBean – backpacks and water bottles. But a new outfit for the first day of school isn’t as big a deal – people buy new clothes throughout the year and in larger quantities than in the ’60’s and ’70’s.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that a new school outfit is no longer a must-have. It must have been an awful way to begin the year for the children who didn’t have them, and heart-breaking for the parents who couldn’t provide them. That doesn’t mean there aren’t judgements made about clothes: now, it’s the designer label rather than the newness that matters. No matter the era, some way of separating those with more than enough from those with enough from those with not enough is in place.
Years ago, when talking with a guest about living into higher levels of compassion and spirituality, Oprah Winfrey remarked that she liked to visit those upper levels of spirituality for tea, but would choose to live on a lower level – because the wardrobe was better there, and she didn’t want to give that up. It got a laugh, of course, but a slightly uncomfortable one.
The first day outfit in elementary school, the team or work uniform, the gowns worn to mark advanced degrees earned, the stoles to mark ordination; all are outward signs of intellectual accomplishment or requirements fulfilled. Is it when we no longer need these, when we put these aside, that we walk through the doors of the house of wisdom and love, comfortable in our own skin and ready to learn?
It happens every year, starting three weeks before the first day of school: the annual migration of parents and children to their local libraries. They are looking for copies of the books assigned for summer reading (There are the rare early birds who do this in June, getting the books read before summer activities and travels).
The first few who come through the door find several options on the special display of required books; the rest find empty shelves where the now-checked-out books recently sat. Most accept this, resigned to buying books online or at the local bookstore; a few put a hold on the library copies, hoping they will be available in time to read before school starts. Others get upset, calling the library useless and stomping out the door.
I understand the frustration and disappointment these migrators feel – I feel the same when I show up at Market Basket or Trader Joe’s on a Monday morning and find empty shelves. If I continue to show up at the same time with the same expectations, I’ll end up with the same empty shelves and the same disappointment. The only way out of this is to change my migratory pattern, to show up on a Monday evening or a Friday morning when the staff has restocked the shelves. If I do this, if I change, I’ll find what I need and then some.
It’s not easy to change our patterns, but it’s possible. It takes effort, it takes a change of perspective, it takes a certain flexibility to adapt to the world as it is rather than expecting the world to accommodate our current patterns. Perhaps this is the first lesson of every school year.
It’s August 19th. Labor Day is almost three weeks off. But the yellow school buses are out and about: several of the local schools are back in session, with several more welcoming learners next week.
I haven’t darkened the door of a classroom, at least as a student, for a long time. But I’ve spent most of my adult life telling stories and leading classes of one sort or another. It might be fun go back to school – to look at the reading, writing, and (a)rithmetic once again. As well as all the other things…art, music, drama, languages, etc…
